WILLIAM BLAKE?
BY C. H. HERFORD, LITT,D., F.B.A.
HONORARY
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE I N THE
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.
"I
FEAR there is no doubt the poor man is mad," wrote Words-
worth once ; " but his madness interests me more than the
sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.** W e put the matter
differently now, but that confession of the greater poet, whose kingdom
the Blakian universe at some points dazzlingly affirms and completes,
at others fiercely rends and repudiates, still remains an apt expression
for the appeal, at once fascinating and challenging, which Blake makes
to the modern mind.
When he died in July,
1827, in an obscure court off the Strand,
.
no one dreamed that " the poor man ** in whom Wordsworth confessed
his interest would become the object of a reverent homage which, after
a century, is still growing ; or that the charge of madness would be
with increasing emphasis dismissed. H e lived among second-rate
artists and third-rate poets ; to the few contemporaries of kindred and
comparative genius he was almost wholly unknown. One or two of
his poems caught the ear of Coleridge ; Lamb went about reciting (and
misquoting) the great anvil-music of the Tiger. T h e cultivated and
highly respectable clubman Crabb Robinson, friend of Coethe and
Rogers, listened with bewilderment to Blake's anarchic paradoxes, and
his record of their talk is a feast for the Comic Spirit. A s for the
mass of the " Prophetic Books," they remained utterly unregarded save
for their fine prints. More than a generation had passed since his
death when Swinburne, one of the first to proclaim Blake's greatness
in lyric, made, in 1868, a serious but ineffectual attempt to penetrate
the forbidding jungle. After almost another generation Mr. W. B.
An amplification of the lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library,
26 October, 1927, and subsequently printed in the Hibbert Iournal for
October, 1927.
31
32
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Yeats, Blake's nearest of kin among all later poets, followed, in 1893,
and his interpretation, more dubiously elaborated by his colleague
Edwin Ellis, compelled the recognition of real if shadowy meaning, as
well as of singular imaginative gandeur, in these enigmatic histories.
Later still, a band of determined students-in particular Sampson
(1 905), Sloss, and Wallis-in Liverpool, where Blake has been somethiig of a local cult, applied to these riddles the resources and the
scruples of modern scholarship. In 1924, Mr. Foster Damon, after
ten years of concentrated labour, evolved from the Prophetic Books a
connected metaphysic, where the Jerzcsalem, the most voluminous,
and abstruse of them, figures as the Ninth Symphony of a Beethoven
of whose deeper music the world was not so much inappreciative as
completely unaware. Finally, we have the very able Lge of Miss
Mona Wilson and the critical Text of Mr. Geoffrey Keynes.
One result emerges clearly from the research and discussion of two
generations. T h e man who uttered himself, now in abstruse mythic
symbols, now in ravishing song, now in painted or engraved figures of
Michelangelesque grandeur, had a soul elemental, simple and profound.
His poetry, his art, his talk, his behaviour obeyed an inner implicit
logic of his own, often enough flagrantly at odds with the logic of
common sense. H e had the inconsistencies, the incoherence which
astute and versatile men avoid, but which are the penalty of elemental
natures thrown into a complex and unsympathetic midieu. H e could
be grotesque and sublime, delicately sensitive and outrageously indecent.
The Songs of Ip~mcence,with their fairy-bell rhymes about lambs and
linnets, and little boys lost and found, are as intimately Blakian as his
grandiose visions of Job and Jehovah, or his defiant declaration that
" to generalii is to be an idiot." The poetry is indeed of finer, more
enduring texture than the thought. T o turn to it from the thought is
often like hearing, after " three sounds," something which is " not a
fourth sound, but a star." But the "star " would not have appeared
had not the three sounds gone before, and the pellucid beauty of Blake's
rarest music presupposes, however IittIe it betrays, the mind of a thinker
absorbed in his interpretation of the universe.
W e can, it is true, distinguish phases in Blake's mental as in his
personal history. But they are changes in temper and outlook, not in
1
WILLIAM BLAKE
33
the fundamental postulates of his thought. Putting aside his earliest
volume, the Poetical Sketches of 1 783, where the untaught engraver's
apprentice completely ignores the literary authorities and fashions of his
day, but rarely, as in the wonderful Man! Song, finds his authentic
voice, we reach, sii years later, the completely authentic Songs of
Innocence. In that sordid and sophisticated eighteenth-century London
he saw visions of elemental simplicity and l~veliness,less subtly shot
with pathos and humour than the London of Elia, but even more
spontaneous and unexpected. The " innocence" is, in a profound
sense, Blake's own. The Blakian Child is not, any more than its
companion the Blakian Lamb, drawn literally from Nature-a region
of experience which he scornfully consigned to the "atheist" Wordsworth. It is steeped in the white, joyous light of an intuition of blessed
and sheltered existence, exempt from foreboding and presage, as the
Wordsworthian child wears the brooding solemnity of the immortality
it is supposed to intimate. Blake's children are not "haunted for ever
by the Eternal Mind," but God, " all in \white," is at hand to lead
them home when they go astray. If, even in this world of innocence,
little boys are sold by their father as chimney-sweeps, God sends them
happy dreams, and they rise to go to work warm and glad ; if an
emmet loses her way among the "tangled sprays," a glow-worm,
" watchman of the night," is there to light the ground.
These passing sorrows of Innocence did not as yet impair for Blake
the " Divine Image" of Mercy and Love. Blake always saw Cod
in human form, and he can here, without an effort, carry out this
instinctive anthropomorphism ; for man, merciful and forgiving, is
already one with Cod :
" For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is Cod our Father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is Man his child and care.
Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell,
There Cod is dwelling too."
But there are signs enough in the Songs of Innocence that Blake's
mind, though as yet untroubled by forebodings, was teeming with
thoughts not to be expressed in these child-like songs. Nature was
alive to him ; years before Wordsworth he heard all things speaking,
3
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and he began to record their speech with the assurance of an imagination which saw everywhere Life, at once human and divine, in the
figures it seemed to invent. The Book of The4 produced in the same
year (1 789),peoples the child's world of the Songs of Innocence with
gentle shapes which interpret the same gospel of lowliness and selfsacrifice. It is Blake's " Treasure of the Humble." There is as little
hint of conflict as in the songs, only a despondency swiftly overcome,
like the forlornness of the Emmet and the little Lost Boy. The
despondency is now, however, uttered in a long, plaintive chant-the
" gentle lamentation " of the maiden Thel, youngest daughter of the
Seraphim, as she watches the fading of all things, the beauty of the
morning, and of the " children of the spring, born but to smile and fall !"
But the lowly things have a higher wisdom ; and the lily of the valley,
"breathing in the humble grass," only to be cropped by the innocent
lamb, the cloud melting away in the sunshine, the trodden worm and
clod of earth, show her how by their willing self-surrender they are
ministering to the one pervading life.
A n optimism thus precariously won was not likely to be securely possessed by a mind so sensitive, so vehement, and so imperfectly organised
as Blake's. The visionary idealism which dissolves the disorders of
the world in innocence and loveliness was not with him, as with
Emerson, a fundamental instinct impervious to the blackest experience.
It was rather a brief idyllic moment in the career of an imagination
which projected itself with fierce intensity into whatever it apprehended,
and fed as congenially on visions of dark and terrific power as on those
of benign and miraculous goodwill. And Blake was writing on the
eve of an actual convulsion which would have dispelled the idyllic
mood from a mind far more naturally equable and balanced than his.
His world of innocence crashed with the crash of the Bastille. That
gentle vision of authority befriending and helpful, of kindly old men
shepherding children on Holy Thursday in St. Paul's, became meaningless in the presence of the unmasked and now tottering despotism
of the old r d ~ m e . T o the titanic uprising of the French people
Blake responded with all the passionate energy of his nature. T h e
1
v
WILLIAM BLAKE
35
ecstatic singer of self-effacement, of lilies willingly cropped and worms
adoringly cut in two, might have been expected to recommend a like
self-effacement to the rebels of Paris. But Blake was only superficially
inconsistent. The self-effacement of the cloud and the clod was not a
negation of being, but the source of a new and fuller life. H e was
discovering the inner core of his own thought. The Love and Mercy
and Humility and Pity, which realised Cod in man, were for him,
not abstract virtues, but forms of spiritual energy ; and he swept on
without a thought of incoherence from the energy which effaces self to
the energy which asserts it, from the love which surrenders and adores
to the love which conquers and enjoys. Blake would probably have
been an ardent partisan of the Revolution had he stood alone. His
revolutionary fervour lost nothing in intensity, and it gained in definiteness, by his early association with the group of English revolutionists
who gathered about William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Codwin
-of whose faded shadow thirty years later Shelley could still say,
" Greater none than he "-was
temperamentally the anti-type of Blake.
His conception of man as a being guided by reason, who would infallibly act aright if laws and Governments did not thwart and cramp
him, stood in flagrant contrast with Blake's repudiation of reason itself
in the name of unfettered desire. But in their denunciation of government and law the " sublime-grotesque *' paradoxes of the intellectual
and of the visionary anarchist marched together. And it was doubtless the influence of Paine, who had fought with the Americans in
their struggle, that wakened Blake tardily to the significance of their
revolution. The newly discovered piece on the French Revolution
(1 791) is less expressive of the transformation wrought by these events
in his mental world than the lurid phantasmal poem America, produced two years later. Here the mysterious powers of the universe
take part in the conflict of nations, and political and ethical anarchism
reinforce one another. Urizen, the Satan of Blake's universe, is at
once the author of the ten " stony " commandments which block the
free energy of man, and the god of Albion's despotic rule. Across
the Atlantic, Albion's Angel is confronted by the Daemon of Emancipation, Orc, who answers his challenge in accents which foretell the unborn Whitrnan, and certainly helped to shape both the music and the
meaning of the later prophet.
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"'I
am Orc
...
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands
What night he led the starry hosts thro' the wide wilderness ;
That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a tom book, and none shall gather the leaves ;
But they shall rot on desert sands, and consume in bottomless deeps.' "
Then the " Thirteen Angels "-the governors of the thirteen Coloniescrouch howling before their caverns, and terror paralyses all the labour
and craft of men ; for on the shores, with their foreheads reared towards
the east, stand the awful figures of Washington and Paine and Warren,
and in their flowing robes children take shelter from the lightnings-a
moving indication that the Blake of Little Lost Boys and Girls was
himself lodged somewhere securely within the Blake of thunder-blasts
and revolution.
But for an explicit exposition of the metaphysic and ethic here.
darkly shadowed we must turn to the famous Marriage of Heaven
am' He& usually dated 1790, but suspected by Mr. Damon to belong
to the confirmed and confident revolutionary temper of 1793.
The great word of the gospel now proclaimed is " Energy," and a
new revolutionary theology is built, at a stroke, upon the basis. Cod
and Devil, Good and Evil, change places ; Heaven and Hell are
"married," but it is a marriage of opposite and eternally hostile, if
eternally necessary, Powers. For human life is a ceaseless struggle of
Energy with the fetters of Law, of boundless imagination with the
prison of the senses. The strong man breaks these fetters, the weak
man surrenders and succumbs, and " humility " is now Blake's name
for the sly submissiveness of the hypocrite. His scorn for reason and
for law is not mere impatience of restraint ; it rests upon a bold and
original metaphysic which resolves all life into energy, and all beiig
into the oneness of God and man, and of both with the "Poetic
genius." Matter is an allusion, the body is a portion of soul perceived
through the senses, and, as there is no external source of knowledge,
all knowledge comes by intuition to the seeing soul, and all the codes
of morality and Iaw which claim to provide it are necessarily futile.
The book which propounds these and similar paradoxes in a dozen
pages of unflagging verve stands alone in the series of Prophetic Books,
which, apart from Thl and Thurz24 it virtually opens. The framework of doctrine is already here, but it is not yet enveloped in the vast
WILLIAM BLAKE
mystic apparatus of contending demonic powers ; and the vaguely
rhythmical Ossianic chant, which will later narrate the fortunes of the
conflict, is here represented by the crisp vernacular prose of epigram
and anecdote. "The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me,"
remarks Blake casually ; and after dinner he put some home questions,
which they answered without hesitation and entirely to lake's mind.
Isaiah proves to be as absolute an intuitionist as Blake himself. " I
saw no God, nor heard any," he replies, "
but my senses discovered the infinite in eve&thing, a i d as I was then persuaded, and
remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of
God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.*' Another, longer,
anecdote describes how he and an Angel journeyed through earth and
space to see their " eternal lots,*' each " lot *' being desperate in the
eyes of the other. It is a truly Blakian journey, homely, grotesque,
sublime by turns, now recalling Bunyan, now Swift, now Dante, but
probably owing nothing to any of them. But the core of the book is
to be found in the series of pregnant sayings which, under the name of
" Proverbs of Hell," crystallise the new wisdom and the new morality.
Some of them reach through paradox to enduring truth, and others
have a strange beauty. It would be hard to contrast the virtues of
saving and giving away more pithily than in Blake's " The cistern contains, the fountain overflows," or to justify original power more finely
than in his " No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own weight."
And was there not something of the soul of Hamlet in the Blakian
" devil " who, hovering over the abyss of the five senses, at the bottom
of which cowers the world of men, wrote this sentence, "with corroding fires " :
" How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way
1s an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five? "
...
In this, as in most of his sayings about the senses, we recognise the
soaring idealism which lies at the heart of his anarchical defiance.
Without any inconsiitency, his proverbs recall utterly diverse systems
of thought. When he tells us that "the busy bee has no time for
sorrow,**we might suppose we are listening to some frugal proverb of
Franklin or Samuel Smiles. But a few sentences later he is calmly
declaring that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,"
that " if the fool woilld persist in his folly he would become wise," and
that " Prudence is a rich ugly old maid, courted by Incapacity." But,
THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
then, how beautifully this uncompromising exaltation of production and
energy is associated with the self-effacing devotion of Christian ethics
in such sayings as that " the cut worm forgives the plow," while
Franklin is ironically disposed of in the pleasant assurance that " the
eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the
crow," and in the incisive dictum " Bring out number, weight and
measure in a year of dearth." Blake's scorn for measure is, in truth,
the attitude of a born Romantic ; but it is not quite so defiant of
Hellenic pCrpov as it sounds. Measure, number and weight, the
standards of the senses, are, like the senses themselves, prison bars
which obstruct the vision of infinity. Blake knew well enough that
he, as little as other men, could do without the senses, that his own
art as a painter was built indissolubly upon visible colour and line ;
but it was man's business, as he declared in another famous saying
later, to "see not with but thrd the eye" ; and his quarrel in later
years with Wordsworth, whom, in spite of hi " atheism," he regarded
as the greatest, or indeed the only, .poet of his age, was that the poet
of T i t e r n called on men to watch " Nature " precisely with open,
receptive eyes, instead of piercing by imagination beyond the obstructive
integument of her sights and sounds. There was less divergencebetween
them than Blake thought. For Wordsworth the eye was indeed an
organ, not a barrier ; it gave occasion to imagination instead of thwarting it, but in the utmost ecstasy of vision it counted for nothing, " the
bodily sense went out." Yet, on the other hand-and again this is a
paradox, not inconsistency-Blake's
passion for infinit, is not in the
least of the kind which scorns the earth "to lose itself in the sky."
The other-wordly abstraction, like all abstractions, is anathema to him.
His infinity repudiates measure and weight, but it is to be found in a
wild flower and held in the palm of the hand ; and so far is " eternity,"
with him, from subsisting in a remote transcendental region, that he
makes it the companion of man in his eager and ardent life ; not the
far-off object of his adoration, but itself the adoring witness of his feats.
" Eternity," he tells us in one of his most searching inversions of
common persuasion, " eternity is in love with the productions of time."
It was not quite thus that Milton, in the closing lines of Comus,
declared that "if Virtue feeble were, heaven itself would stoop to
her." Blake's universe contains no power that succours feeble virtue ;
his Eternity is only for the strong.
WILLIAM BLAKE
But with Milton Blake had, as we know, a more specific and
fundamental quarrel than this. Paradise Lost and its author exercised
a lifelong fascination over Blake's powerful and indocile intellect, as Ae
did, during the same years, over the not less stubborn originality of
Wordsworth. But while Wordsworth looked back to him with
passionate reverence and longing as the one man whom England
needed at that hour, Blake regarded him with the mingled homage and
indignation of a disciple whose master had been untrue to himself and
given the lie in words to his own implicit faith. For Milton "was a
true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." His real hero
in Paradise Lost was Satan, and his indignation was only free and
unconfined when he was writing of Hell and Fiends. But Milton
chose to write in fetters, to pretend that he was telling the story not of
boundless aspiration, but of Cod's constraint of it by commands and
prohibitions and penalties. So he called the imposer of restraint the
Messiah, and the true Messiah, who fell and fashioned a new heaven
in the abyss, Satan. Paradise Lost is, indeed, the story of the Fall
of Man, a Fall, however, resulting not from his disobedience, but from
the successful subjection of his desire, the stuff of energetic life in his
manhood, to "reason." For " those who restrain desire," says Blake
in one of his trenchant aphorisms, "do so because t h e i s a i s j m k
enough to be restrained," and the restrainer, or reason, usurps its place
and goveTns the unwilling. And, being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire, " and man the shadow
of man." All this is, of course, as a criticism of Milton, a half-truth ;
but the half-truth has never been more trenchantly and fearlessly put,
and Milton himself recognised its force, from an opposite point of view,
when he stripped Satan, as the serpent-tempter of Eve, of the dangerously moving sublimity of the fallen archangel.
T h e tone of the marriage is untouched by doubt, fear or regret.
It is caustic, ironic, often fiercely exultant. Yet exultation was not a
mood easily maintained, either by partisans of the Revolution or by its
opponents, after 1793. Wordsworth, we know, when he saw his
hopes for France and his faith in his own country siiultaneously
shattered, fell into an abyss of despondency, and for a time "gave up
all moral questions in despair." Blake underwent a change at least
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outwardly analogous. His symbolic utterance is less transparent than
the self-revelation of the Predzcde, but it is clear that his buoyant assurance is now overclouded. T h e powers that thwart man's aspiration and curb his will are more potent and more ruthless than he had
dreamed. But a new harvest of songs, not less exquisite and delicate
in music, but less elemental in emotion and subtler in thought, than the
Songs of Innoce?zce, came to him as he watched this darkening of the
"dawn."
T h e Songs ofExfem'ence, published in 1794, five years
after the earlier collection, was directly put forward as its counterpart.
T h e title-page prefixed to the two collections describes them as
"Showing the Contrary States of the Human Soul." Strictly, the
"States" shown are not "contrary" even in the sense of Milton's
contrast of " Cheerful " and " Pensive " moods, of which Blake was
perhaps thinking. T h e poet of " Experience" is not painting a new
picture in contrast with the old, still less holding up the one against
the other with Hamlet's " Look here upon this picture and on that."
H e is rather lifting a curtain and disclosing a menacing and stormy
background not visible to the earlier ~ainter,but which does not
diminish the truth or the loveliness of what he saw. T h e tenderness
which makes the emmet's wail so poignant, as she thinks, "heartbroke," of her children, only gathers a richer content when he is singing of a world subject to sterner, more impIacabIe forces, where the
canker really consumes the rose, and whence the " Sunflower, weary
of Time," longs, "counting the steps of the sun," to escape. T h e
" Voice of the Bard " calling on Earth, a lapsed soul weeping in her
'' den " in the dewy darkness, to " return,'' for day is breaking, and
Earth's " Answer " out of the gloom, have the ineffable pathos of an
adagio of Beethoven, and a like miraculous simplicity of phrase and
rhythm :
'' ' 0 Earth, 0 Earth, return I
Arise from out the dewy grass ;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.'
" Earth rais'd up her head
From the darkness dread and drear,
Her light fled,
Stoney dread !
And her locks cover'd with grey despair.
WILLIAM BLAKE
'' ' Prison'd on watery shore
Starry jealousy does keep my den :
Cold and hoar,
Weeping o'er
I hear the father of the ancient men
" ' Break this heavy chain
...
. . . !' "
Song of this clear loveliness had not been heard in England siice
the seventeenth century. Some of the scenes and figures of the former
songs reappear, touched to sterner issues. T h e voices of children are
still heard on the green, and the " Nurse " calling them home. But
now the sun is gone down and the Nurse is sour and pale. " Holy
Thursday " comes by still, but the crowds of happy children shepherded
into Paul's by kindly old men now evoke only a cry of indignation at
the sight of these "babes" fed by charity "with cold and usurous
hand." T h e little chimney-sweeper's "'weep, 'weep," is now a note
of woe, and Cod, no longer tender and consoling, only listens to the
praise of the pious and "makes a heaven of our misery." T h e
Garden of Love is filled with graves and overrun with briars, and
harm and destruction, instead of preparing the way for new life, like
the fading of the lily and the melting of the cloud, now only poison its
seeds and nprings.
'' The youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse."
T h e little Clod of earth still utters its song of self-effacing love, and
with a lyric beauty not yet reached in its answer to Thel, but only to
hear the Pebble of the brook's retort that
"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
A n d as the Pebble supersedes the Clod, so, in the greatest and most
famous of these poems, the Tiger replaces the Lamb. " Did he who
made the Lamb make thee ? " asks Blake, and he did not mean to
invite a pious a h a t i o n in answer. It was not a merciful Father who
let loose this deadly terror ; for the world of experience is full of blind,
implacable forces which crush man as man's " thoughtless hand"
brushes away a fly's summer joy. But only a great poet, who gloried
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in energy, might and wrath, could have conveyed through these
hammer-strokes of rhythm the impression of immeasurable hostile
power at work in the universe. Most often it was in vast and vague
symbols, as in his nearly contemporary picture of Urizen, the spirit of
priestly obscurantism and negation-" a shadow of horror
unknown,
unprolic, dark, revolving in silent activity, unseen in tormenting passions, an activity unknown and horrible.
In the Tzlp.eer these
vague, shadowy symbols give place to a siigle shape of living intensity
and splendour.
...
. . ."
IV.
It was, however, in the " Urizen," not in the "Tiger" vein, in
shadowy symbols and unfettered, often incoherent, rhythm, not in
song, that Blake henceforth communicated the main burden of his
message to the world. The change of temper and mood which followed his residence with Hayley at Felpham (1 800-1803) is apparent
in the later prophetic books. T h e obsession of earth " weeping " in a
den guarded by malign powers, which, in various forms, dominated his
imagination throughout the years of revolution, is not overcome. But
man's doom in this captive state is no longer embittered by the memory
of his lost innocence, or relieved only by the hope of an ultimate regeneration. A s Blake sat on the Sussex shore at " Sweet Felpham,"
the October sun, streaming over land and sea, became a vision of
celestial light, and the despised senses, called once more into lively
play, subtly contributed to restore imagination. So Wordsworth, in
Dorset, a few years before, had recovered the imaginative power
through the " gift " of awakened eyes and ears. " Angels of Providence " now watch over fallen man, flower and tree, and bid and
insect, though repudiated as material things, become sources of spiritual
influence. Above all, man has immediate access through imagination
to Eternity ; the " world of imagination " and " the world of eternity "
being for Blake, as he expressly tells us, the same? From this it was
but a step to the assertion that Christ, Eternal God, is incarnated in
the imagination of men. Thus the revolutionary anarchism of the
Marriage, with its ridicule of priests and " Angels," gave place to a
new and transcendental Christianity almost equally baffling to the
simple believer. This later Christianity of Blake's, ardent and em-
Fm the Year, 1810.
WILLIAM BLAKE
43
phatic as it is, did not originate in any strictly Christian process of
thought. It was rather a by-product of the imaginative exaltation of
these years, of the inner glory which seemed to make him, and every
other man who imagined it, divinely one with the eternity of the universe. H e saw Eternity flooding the mind of every man who imagined,
and, since Eternity was the very Body of Christ, the imaginative life
became an implicit and continuous incarnation. " I know of no other
Christianity," he wrote, "than the liberty both of body and mind to
What is the Divine
exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.
Spirit ? Is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain ? "
Is it in this sense that we must understand the rapturous account of his
new birth given to his friend Butts in 1802 :
" Let me finish with assuring
you that, though I have been
- .
very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again emerged into the
light of day ; I still and shall to Eternity embrace Christianity
and adore Him who is the express image of Cod."
In the power of this faith Blake declared war on the generation
which had built the " Satanic mills " of Reason in this England, once a
Christian land :
" Bring me my Bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire ;
Bring me my spear : 0 clouds, unfold I
Bring me my Chariot of fire !
...
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land."
So he wrote, in 1804, in the proem to MilLon. The vast, epic
jemsalem is the Iliad of this prolonged war of Imagination with
Reason, of Christ with Satan ; a war carried on, if not " by night," *
in a phantasmal gloom, perplexed with marchings and counter-marchings, until finally Albion is delivered and restored to Christ. And the
seer had now a great ally ; for Milton, whom the " atheist " Wordsworth had vain& summwed to England's need, and to whom Blake
had in the Marnage given the direct lie, has abandoned his seat in
Eternity, recanted his doctrine, and entered into the body of Blake at
Felpham, to proclaim through his lips, with the authority and emphasis
of a convert, that self-seeking, which he had once made so magnificent
in his Satan, is in truth Satanic, and self-sacrifice and forgiveness divine.
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And this faith is the metaphysical background of the later poetry.
The great quatrain which opens Auguries of Innocence (1 810) thus
acquires a fuller significance. T o
" Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour,"
is not hard when " eternity" is thus accessiile. That Heaven should
64
rage" when a redbreast is captive becomes credible when " heaven "
is seen in a wild flower. Blake's vision of eternity on earth had nothng in common with the sentimentality which sees all things touched
with an idealising glamour. O n the contrary, cruelty and baseness
and venal lust " tear the fibres of his brain," and his abhorrence breaks
from hi in lines of a concentrated and searing poetry unmatched in
their kind in the language :
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shd weave Old England's winding sheet.
The winner's shout, the loser's curse
Dance before dead England's hearse."
Blake's greatest poem,
Th Everlmting
Gospel, at length arranged
in diicult but intelligible order by Dr. Sampson, though composed in
1810, recalls the revolutionary antinomian paradoxes of the Marm'age
twenty years earlier. In brief couplets of concentrated scorn Blake
repudiates the meek and lowly Jesus of traditional Christianity. " Was
Jesus humble 2" H e points to the Jesus who broke the laws, disobeyed His parents, and forgave the adulterous woman ; the whole
fabric of Jewish law fell to ruin at His touch :
" H e laid His hand on Moses' law :
The ancient Heavens in silent awe,
Writ with curses from pole to pole,
All away began to roll."
But the purport of The E v e r l a d i n g Go@eG is not iconoclasm. Blake
dismisses the Jesus of evangelicalism in order to vindicate his own
" eternal Christ," who could not humble Himself without also
humbling God, and in whom man, partiapating through imagination,
became one with God, and God with him. With a life so exalted and
so instinctive humility and doubt were impossible :
" Humility is only doubt
And does the sun and moon blot out,
Roofing over with thorns and stems
The buried soul with all its gems."
WILLIAM BLAKE
45
And Blake puts into the mouth of Cod his profoundest ahmation of
the divineness of Man when he reproves the " humility" of Christ :
" Thou art a man ; God is no more :
Thy own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of Iife."
v.
"
I will not Reason and Compare," wrote Blake in the Jemcsahm ;
"my busiiess is to Create.** And his work has been declared by the
i
r Walter Raleigh to be " one prolonged vindication of the cause
late S
of all the artists in the world." It is ; and yet the vindication,
ma&cently sustained and confident as it was, is incomplete. It can
be accepted only with two reserves. One is demanded precisely by
"all the artists in the world," whose creative activity he is said to
vindicate. H e scorned the senses, and suffered for his scorn. He
insisted on seeing " through " and not " with ** the eye, and what he
and memorable indeed. But the artist, whatever
thus saw was
he sees, has to interpret his visions in terms of form and colour which
others must see " with" the eye as the condition of seeing through it,
and Blake's often imperfect drawing, like any other kind of faulty
translation, merely obscures the meaning. But the transcendent things
he had to say glorify even the less defensible idioms of his artist
speech.
And they glorify likewise the imperfections which arise from his
refusal to " reason and compare." But was this refusal necessary* as
he thought, for one whose " business was to create ? ** The Romantic
in him assumed it, but the Romantic psychology which repudiated consecutive thinking in the name of " inspiration " was a disease of its time.
Dante (in whose mind many modern dilemmas find their implicit
solution) knew nothing of that peremptory antithesis. A creator of no
less heroic nerve (to say the least) than Blake, he was also incomparably
greater both as a thinker and as a poetic artist. It had not occurred
to the disciple of Virgil and of Thomas Aquinas that imaginative intuition and consecutive thought were inconsistent processes. Dante*s
cosmos may be as fundamentally irrational as Blake's, his vision of
eternal things no less beset with myth. But the irrationality of
Dante is in the strictest sense a " function " of his reason ; his imagination, of far vaster compass and security than Blake's, satisfies even too
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completely the intellect's eagerness to have all questions answered, all
the mysteries of the religious consciousness resolved. His universe is
clear and radiant wie am ersten Tag,where Blake's is a chaos at
once sublime and confused. And Dante's vision of eternal things, so
much more cogent and consistent than Blake's, goes along with, or at
bottom grows out of, a mastery of the nature and history of the sublunary world to which Blake was, to his grave hurt, completely strange.
His scorn for number and measure was an amusing but significant
example of this. Number, the plaything of "Saint Isaac," measure,
the pitiful resource of frugality in " a year of dearth," was for Dante,
as for Pythagoras and Plato, a vital element in the structure of the
universe, as of all adequate thought about it. The hundred cantos of
the Comedy were not the device of an artist with an eye for symmetry.
Dante, of all poets, did not sing "as the linnet sings," and the author
of the Yz2a Nuova confounds the adherent of that theory of poetry
by minutely explaining the plan on which his sonnets are built. But
neither the Yzta Nuova nor the Comedy is less consummate poetry
because they are articulately thought out. Blake's vision itself suffers
because imagination is not adequately sustained by the fundamental
thinking which Dante Rossetti postulated as the basis of a sonnet.
The vision is not fully mastered. When Arthur Symons showed
Rodin some of Blake's drawings, assuring him that he actually saw
what he painted, Rodin replied, " Yes, he saw it once, but he ought
to have seen it three or four times." Both in painting and in poetry
his inspiration had in it something fortuitous, incalculable and insecure ;
and between the lightning flashes there often intervened tracts of
dubious and imperfectly vital work hardly paralleled in one who saw
SO intensely when he saw. But these great moments are often charged
with an apprehension of sublimity or of loveliness, of goodness and of
pity, of the awe and beauty which can be evoked from the contours of
the human body and the rhythms of artless song, in their kind unexampled. H e was not the greatest poet of his generation. But
neither Wordsworth nor Shelley had a more intense vision of poetry
than this lonely prophet of the imagination, who uttered their common
faith in accents as clear as theirs while the one was still struggling in
the meshes of artificial diction, and the other was unborn.